Can vehicular cloud replace edge computing?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether Vehicular Cloud Computing can replace edge computing in urban areas by analyzing key parameters through simulation and cost comparison, highlighting VCC's potential to enable low-latency applications more cost-effectively.

Contribution

It provides a simulation-based analysis of conditions where VCC can substitute EC and offers a cost comparison demonstrating VCC's economic advantages.

Findings

VCC can potentially replace EC in urban environments with high vehicle density.

VCC offers significant cost savings over deploying traditional EC nodes.

Simulation results identify key parameters influencing VCC's effectiveness.

Abstract

Edge computing (EC) consists of deploying computation resources close to the users, thus enabling low-latency applications, such as augmented reality and online gaming. However, large-scale deployment of edge nodes can be highly impractical and expensive. Besides EC, there is a rising concept known as Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC). VCC is a computing paradigm that amplifies the capabilities of vehicles by exploiting part of their computational resources, enabling them to participate in services similar to those provided by the EC. The advantage of VCC is that it can opportunistically exploit part of the computation resources already present on vehicles, thus relieving a network operator from the deployment and maintenance cost of EC nodes. However, it is still unknown under which circumstances VCC can enable low-latency applications without EC. In this work, we show that VCC has the potential to effectively supplant EC in urban areas, especially given the higher density of vehicles in such environments. The goal of this paper is to analyze, via simulation, the key parameters determining the conditions under which this substitution of EC by VCC is feasible. In addition, we provide a high level cost analysis to show that VCC is much less costly for a network operator than adopting EC.